MONTREAL — Lino Zambito, his next of kin and Zambito’s pizza restaurant north of the city have all been placed under close protection by the...

They come and go, the politicians. Some, more swiftly than others. These elected officials may be smart and charismatic, ruthless and corrupt, honest and true, clueless or wilfully blind.

For the moment, we’ll leave it to others to fill in the box that best describes Mayor Gérald Tremblay.

Yet even the quickest student needs time to get the hang of a new job, to find out where the bathrooms are and who are most dependable suppliers, to discover who has the best gossip and where the bodies are buried.

For this, politicians must put their faith in the hired help. Most are civil servants, the lifers who have worked their way through the system to become institutional decision-makers, to shape policy and run the shop.

A few more will be appointees, managers and political attachés chosen by the ruling party. Their loyalty is not to the city, the province or the taxpayers, but rather, as former prime minister Brian Mulroney was known to say, “to dance with the one that brung ya.”

And of course, there are some topics on which politicians will never be experts. They do not know squat about traffic patterns, or the width and strength of a sewer pipe or how dense a slab of concrete must be to withstand the weight of a morning commute.

For this, politicians must rely on the opinions, wisdom and honesty of public servants, the engineers and urban planners, consultants and inspectors who deal with contractors. They have the contacts, leverage and the power to make key recommendations on what is best for the state.

Or maybe simply for themselves.

Among the most troubling revelations as the Charbonneau inquiry drills deeper into corruption in the Quebec construction industry is what is depicted as a nonchalant, even cavalier, culture of self-interest among some of Montreal’s civil servants when opportunity, and the Mob, came knocking.

Yes, gut-spilling witness Lino Zambito says he met some law-abiding folks in his dealings with the city. But he said there was also no shortage of corrupt officials at every level of Montreal’s bureaucratic pyramid.

People such as Gilles Surprenant and Luc Leclerc, the city engineers Zambito routinely worked when brokering public works contracts for his now-bankrupt business Infrabec. Zambito alleges Leclerc and Surprenant alone cost him $100,000 to $200,000 in kickbacks.

Or Robert Abdallah, who was Montreal’s city manager back in 2005. That’s when Zambito says he was told he had to use concrete pipes that would add hundreds of thousands of dollars to the cost of a $10-million sewer contract because, it was alleged, Abdallah had made a deal with the supplier, Groupe Tremca.

What’s more, Zambito claims everyone at city hall seemed to have known the score. “It was like it was being shouted from the rooftops. It was just business as usual.”

Now suppose for a moment that you have a colleague whose job includes dealing with suppliers and contractors. This co-worker has the same salary as you, yet they can somehow afford swanky sports cars and golfing holidays in Mexico. Wouldn’t you notice? Were all the honest people at city hall and the National Assembly suspicious and aware, or jaded and apathetic? Did they even try to blow the whistle?

Or did they just sit back and let it all happen, fearing the rot was so deeply ingrained and far-reaching that they were better off keeping their heads down — or lining up for the Christmas party and the fancy gift basket themselves?

Susan Rose-Ackerman is a Yale University professor who has spent the past 35 years studying corruption in government, which she calls “the predictable dark side of the modern state.”

Writing in the Yale Law Journal in 2010, Rose-Ackerman said it’s inevitable that some politicians and civil servants will fall for the money trap.

But she said that doesn’t mean we can afford to ignore the debilitating effect of such corrupt practices on fairness, competence, democracy, the economy and public safety.

“Of particular import is corruption at the top of the state hierarchy that involves political leaders and their close associates, and concerns the award of major contracts,” she wrote in Corruption: Greed, Culture and the State.

“Grand corruption may induce leaders to support massive one-of-a-kind infrastructure projects that have little justification beyond their appeal as bribe generation machines.”

But there’s much more to the issue of crooked public servants than the cost to taxpayers, or even the risk of slipshod workmanship, although Quebecers have seen more than enough of that in recent years.

There is the very danger that it is no longer the mayor or the premier or even the civil servants who are making the big decisions anymore.

“Bureaucrats are likely to organize their offices and rewrite the rules to induce additional payoffs, and politicians may structure their activities to generate even larger bribes or illegal campaign donations,” Rose-Ackerman wrote.

“If this happens, nonstate actors such as organized gangs, on the one hand, and benevolent associations, on the other, may substitute for a weak state.

“The tendency to operate outside the state may create a feedback loop that further weakens democratic legitimacy and state power.”